Starting an Honors thesis project can be extremely intimidating, especially if you haven’t thought about your topic and what you want to write about for such a big project. This week I talked to Shania Watts (senior, music and English) about her Honors thesis, in hopes of providing some inspiration for fellow Honors students who are interested in starting to think about their own research.
What is your Honors thesis about?
My research is titled "Avenues to Influence: The Impact of the Musicians Club of Women In the Careers of Florence Price and Blythe Owen." I am doing my research on the friendship of Florence Price and Blythe Owen. During the 1930s in Chicago, they were both classical composers, and Florence Price was African American and Blythe was white. Their friendship was highly unusual, considering the historical tensions with the Jim Crow era and the Great Depression, but they were both in a musicians group for women. I think Owens was in the club a little bit before Price was, but we have evidence in the James White Library in the Owens Collection in the Center for Adventist Research (collection 186), and we have two letters from 1948 and 1949. That confirmed that they had known each other prior to Florence Price joining the club. With this in mind, I'm not only informing the broader field of Price scholarship, but I'm also exploring how their friendship could have worked, because all relationships are transactional to a degree. I’m looking at the transactional elements of the relationship and determining if it was more business related, or actually personal, because they had a lot of similarities in their life. They were both composers and very religious, and they both had similar problems with their spouses. So there are a lot of similarities that could suggest that their friendship went beyond the levels of just professionalism, and so I'm analyzing this under the lens of intersectionality, white feminism, and Musicology, which is just a fancy term for music history. My research is basically how both figures fit within the musicology timeline and also within feminism.
What made you choose your topic?
I started it because I'm working at the CAR (Center for Adventist Research) and I was transcribing a woman's personal letters to her mother. And I've been interested in Florence Price for a long time because I'm also Black and studying classical music and there are just not a lot of people who look like me in this field. The fact that there was a woman in the past who kind of paved the way for women like me was so fascinating. It felt like we had a connection.
What is your favorite thing about your research?
It’s very hands-on in terms of historical research. Being able to read letters from the 1920s kind of takes me back in time. I can see how people lived and compare it to our lives today or how different it is from our lives today. So I really enjoyed that aspect of it because it's like time traveling a little bit.
What advice would you give to other people who are trying to start their Honors research soon?
Pick something that is very personal to you, something that you feel some sort of connection to. Obviously this would be more relevant for humanities majors since I know the science people can't really do that. So if you are in a humanities related field, pick something that you know you're going to enjoy because it makes the process so much easier. When you actually are interested in what you're doing, it’s so much more enjoyable. Pick something that you're passionate about, and that will make the process of research much easier because it is really difficult to get in the mood and make time to work on your project.
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